FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT DAN JANSEN - PAGE 3

With all the attention on Bonnie Blair's final competition in the United States, the men's event at this weekend's World Sprint Speedskating Championships looks like an afterthought. It should be seen as a preview of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, where speedskating will be one of three sports in which the home team has strong medal hopes. Those chances have been buoyed by the performances of five Japanese men sprinters on the World Cup circuit. Brothers Yasunori, 28, and Yukinori Miyabe, 26; Manabu Horii, 22; Hiroyasu Shimizu, 20; and Toshiyuki Kuroiwa, 25, have won 12 of the 17 World Cup sprints this season.

Nearly three years after he slipped and fell twice during the Winter Olympics, speedskater Dan Jansen is using TV replays of his 1988 letdown to motivate his quest for a gold medal in 1992. He said the televised reviews of his falls on the ice and occasional rude questions and jokes by reporters and well-meaning fans have created the pressure he needs to bring home a medal, if he gets a second chance. "I don`t get nervous like most people," he said. "I usually skate better when I feel pressure because a lack of it psyches me out otherwise."

Back in the day when Jim McKay brought us up close and personal with our Olympic heroes in Innsbruck, we knew that glory could one day be ours too. Aside from the Alps, what did Franz Klammer have that we didn't? If Eric Heiden or, later, Dan Jansen could turn back-yard skating into a shining moment on the medal stand, why couldn't we? Ah, but years passed. Dreams faded. Today, the athletes at Turin are only reminders of what we might have been had we stopped watching Jim McKay and actually gone outside during the winter.

`He was your everyday kind of guy who gets looked over. He never did anything outstanding, but he was just a pillar of strength all the time.' -Dawn Booth, on her husband, Donald, who was killed Monday by ice falling from the Neiman Marcus building. CONVICTED MURDERER LAWRENCIA `BAMBI' BEMBENEK, ON MEDIA SEXISM TOWARD WOMEN ACCUSED OF CRIMES: -`I was a waitress at the Playboy Club for three weeks, but I'll always be known as the Playboy bunny.' `My last chance turned out to be the best.

Dan Jansen and Bonnie Blair continued their record-setting ways Sunday at the U.S. Olympic speedskating trials. For the second straight day, Blair, the three-time gold medalist from Champaign, and Jansen, the world-record holder from West Allis, Wis., broke the Pettit National Ice Center records at 1,000 meters. The first three-day session of the trials that will determine squads of up to 10 men and eight women for the Olympics in February in Lillehammer, Norway, ended Sunday.

`Making "Apocalypse Now" was like going to war. I didn't just feel like a soldier; I was a soldier-in a sense that we were 300 people who were foreigners in a foreign place, and anything that wasn't what we were doing was hostile to us.' -Actor Laurence Fishburne, who was 14 when he acted in the movie, which was filmed in the Philippines. TIM ALLEN, STAR OF "HOME IMPROVEMENT," ON WHOM HE WOULD INVITE TO DINNER IF HE COULD: `. . . . Ya gotta have Adolf Hitler-just so I could say, "Please pass the salt and by the way, what the ?

A huge void will develop in U.S. speedskating fortunes once gold medalists Bonnie Blair and Dan Jansen move on. The dip could last through the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, before American long-track skaters regain the international strength that has made them famous. No budding contenders are waiting in the wings, as Blair and Jansen were when Eric and Beth Heiden moved on. No others have finished higher than 19th in the 10 Olympic races here. Insiders blame the U.S. International Speedskating Association for failing to mount a serious development program.

With two weeks until this season's Blackhawks take the ice for the start of training camp, general manager Dale Tallon and coach Trent Yawney are getting a look at their future. Draft picks from the last two years and a group of undrafted free agents are in town for an orientation to professional hockey. "It's kind of an indoctrination and orientation," Tallon said of the camp, which began Monday and will run through Saturday at the Edge in Bensenville. "We'll tell them what we're about and where we're going as an organization."

They say they have no problem with each other. They simply don't root for each other, don't congratulate each other on gold-medal victories and don't talk to each other. And, oh, yeah, each would like nothing better than to take the gold medal away from the other Tuesday in the 1,500 meters, considered the classic convergence of sprint and endurance and perhaps the most prestigious of all speed-skating events. It's a dream matchup for NBC. The only thing missing is that Chicago's Shani Davis and Houston's Chad Hedrick will be skating against the clock and not each other, as Davis will be the last competitor to go and Hedrick the third-to-last.

Kristi Yamaguchi was near perfection in her winning debut as a professional figure skating competitor. Yamaguchi, the 1992 Olympic gold medalist, received five perfect scores from the seven judges for the artistic program phase of the World Professional Figure Skating Championships on Saturday in Landover, Md. That gave her the victory over 1990 world pro champion Denise Biellmann of Switzerland. Rosalynn Sumners, the 1984 Olympic silver medalist, was third, while three-time U.S. champion Jill Trenary took fourth.